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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9861975" data-attributes="member: 7026594">What kind of analysis?  A single sentence taken out of context obviously is really hard to analyze meaningfully.  But that's not how literary analysis is generally done. We can speculate that blue used in a story might be intended to imply "feeling blue" emotionally, but practically no one is going to assert it confidently without substantial greater contextual support.Usually asking the question, "What if the author intended blue to indicate an emotion?" is a prompt to reflect on a) whether that changes the meaning of the scene in a way which makes sense, or reinforces other elements and confirms the meaning more deeply, and b) whether there's evidence elsewhere in the text that the author is using colors symbolically this way.  IF so, and it's an if, than maybe we can derive more meaning from the work and pick up additional satisfying details.Do you pick up the number of watery words in this passage?  The number of ways in which Goldberry, the river-woman's daughter, and the things emanating from/around her, share qualities of water?  If you go ahead and read the rest of the chapter and the other descriptions of her, these are not an isolated instance. It's enough that it's pretty obvious Tolkien was doing it intentionally. Even from three sentences it looks like a clear pattern, but obviously if we just noticed it and realized it looked like a theme, we'd check the rest of the chapter to confirm.</blockquote>

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